UN: The number of refugees worldwide has surpassed a record 60 million

Refugees wait to cross the Greek-Macedonian border near
the village of IdomeniThomson
Reuters

GENEVA (Reuters) - The number of people forcibly displaced
worldwide is likely to have "far surpassed" a record 60 million
this year, mainly driven by the Syrian war and other protracted
conflicts, the United Nations said on Friday.

The estimated figure includes 20.2 million refugees fleeing wars
and persecution, the most since 1992, the U.N. High Commissioner
for Refugees (UNHCR) said in a report.

Nearly 2.5 million asylum seekers have requests pending, with
Germany, Russia and the United States receiving the highest
numbers of the nearly one million new claims lodged in the first
half of the year, it said.

"2015 is on track to see worldwide forced displacement exceeding
60 million for the first time - 1 in every 122 humans is today
someone who has been forced to flee their homes," it said. The
total figure at the end of 2014 was 59.5 million.

An estimated 34 million people were internally displaced as of
mid-year, about 2 million more than the same time in 2014. Yemen,
where civil war erupted in March, reported the highest number of
newly uprooted people at 933,500.

"Never has there been a greater need for tolerance, compassion
and solidarity with people who have lost everything," Antonio
Guterres, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said in a
statement.

Developing countries bordering conflict zones still host the
lion's share of the refugees, the report said, warning about
growing "resentment" and "politicization of refugees".

The report, based on official figures as of mid-year before the
influx of refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean to
reach Europe peaked in October, extrapolates from trends to
estimate the global total.

Syria's civil war that began in 2011 has been the main driver of
mass displacement, with more than 4.2 million Syrian refugees
having fled abroad and 7.6 million uprooted within their
shattered homeland as of mid-year, UNHCR said.

Together, nationals of Syria and Ukraine, where a separatist
rebellion in the east erupted in April 2014, accounted for half
of the 839,000 people who became refugees in the first half of
2015, it said.

Violence in Afghanistan, Somalia and South Sudan sparked large
refugee movements, as well as fighting in Burundi, the Central
African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Iraq.

Voluntary returns - a measure of how many refugees can safely go
back home - are at their lowest levels in more than three
decades, with only 84,000 people returning by mid-year against
107,000 at the same time a year before, the UNHCR said.

Many refugees will live in exile for years to come, it said. "In
effect, if you become a refugee today your chances of going home
are lower than at any time in more than 30 years.